A skilled programmer would also not evaluate products based on a vague term like "performance". Instead he or she would consider memory usage, speed of processing, and probably other "performance" factors.

These are Application Programming Interfaces (API), they are not "parsers." They help developers develop applications that interact with a parser. To understand them clearly is to recognize that the "parsing" and the "processing" that you code is not the same. That said, the performance or speed of any application written with any of these API will depend mostly on how well the application was written. If it is written in a poor way with memory hogging data structures and such, it might be much slower than a different application written with the same API but with a more efficient design.

Aside, if you can write an application using the Simple API for XML (SAX), this will most likely be the fastest. But, depending upon the actual requirements it may take longer to write or may exceed the programmer's skill level, i.e. writing SAX-based code takes advanced knowledge of XML and Java.